Sketch Tools

Sketch tools are used to create specific features within the sketch environment. The key to correct usage of sketch tools is understanding each one's function. This page details more advanced tools and the benefits/drawbacks of using them.

Create Menu

Lines and Polygons

Specialized

Mirror

Pattern

Project/Include/Intersect

The P key, or a visit to the Create menu highlights a useful tool known as the Project tool. This tool creates a projection of any body, feature, component, etc. onto your sketch that allows you to use those lines as a reference. This is a very good tool for lazy CAD because it allows for thoughtless projecting without much understanding about properly defining things. As a result, when changing parameters, scaling objects, or doing changes backwards in the timeline, you often run into errors with your projections that cause irreparable chaos and eventually a full reCAD of that sketch and everything after it.

The Intersect tool has the same instabilities, but is used to detect the surface, line, or point with which a body, plane, or line intersects your sketch plane. Whatever you are projecting must intersect with your sketch plane.

Modify Menu

Fillet/Chamfer

Just like in the Solid workspace, the fillet and chamfer tools perform the same operations but within a sketch. Using them is unadvisable because although they save on computing power, editing them is a pain, they remove constraints that keep your lines black, and they perform function limited within the plane you are working in (the Solid workspace Fillet/Chamfer is much more useful because it works in 3d).

Trim/Break

Same downsides as the Fillet/Chamfer tools. The Trim tool (shortcut T) and Break tool help clean up your sketch and remove extra line endings and other unwanted things. The Trim tool is most useful when you make a line of arbitrary length in one direction (because you don't know its exact length yet) and then intersect that line with one coming at an angle that you have already defined. Trimming that extra length of the prior line is an easy way to save a few seconds that it would take you to use the Coincident constraint on both other lines' endpoints.

Offset

The most stable tool in the Modify menu is the Offset tool (shortcut O). This simple tool is probably the only too that it much more useful within the Sketch environment than in the Solid workspace. It is very simple to use.